Silicon Valley's Favorite Shoe Company Has Some New Kicks

[Narrator] Last year, the San Francisco startup Allbirds

released a shoe it calls the Wool Runner.

This eco-friendly merino wool sneaker

has since exploded in popularity,

especially in the Bay area, where it's become

something of a staple in the Silicon Valley uniform.

And this week, Allbirds is unveiling its second product,

the Wool Lounger.

Allbirds gave us a pair to test, and true to the company's

core philosophy, they are very comfortable.

They're also surprisingly durable.

They do get soggy in the rain, but unlike a pair

of canvas sneakers, they dry out in a matter of hours.

Plus, the moisture-wicking properties of merino

has kept them remarkably stank free for more

than 100 miles of sock-free walks through San Francisco.

All of which is pretty impressive,

especially for such a simple-looking shoe.

There's an irony, I think we've created

a product that looks like it could've been designed

in two minutes.

[Narrator] Of course, it took a little longer than that.

Designing a laceless shoe out of merino wool

actually required thousands of hours of sketching

and hundreds of prototypes.

And I think you could argue that yes, our products

are kind of austere, but I think they're also

an exercise in maximalism, you know, in that we're

truly celebrating the wool and letting that be

all that we make a noise about.

[Narrator] The earliest mock-ups descended from

martial arts slippers, the kind of thing you might have seen

Bruce Lee wear.

But the shoe evolved quickly from there with the designers

obsessing over every last detail.

We thought we were letting ourselves off the hook

by relying on this kind of gaudy, over the top gusset,

and we challenged ourselves to do better.

This one didn't offer us the kind of support

that we were looking for, especially around the back

of the shoe.

So we make this big jump towards a slipper form,

which was a breakthrough, a seemingly obvious one

in hindsight, but then the challenge was to make

this thing not look like a slipper.

Started to really zoom in on the detail,

we've got the seams all in the appropriate places.

[Tim] And we'd arrived at this pure, simple form.

It feels like a familiar object that owns

a different occasion than the runner.

And really like the final sort of icing on the cake

was to take this away from grays and browns

and from contrast soles into this blocked color,

and that's been a really important final little signature

on a product that I think has been incredibly painful

to create but something that I think we're really

proud about.